Cynthia Rudin Elected AAAS Fellow

Cynthia Rudin, professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, statistical science, mathematics, and biostatistics and bioinformatics at Duke University, has been elected a 2024 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Rudin was recognized for outstanding research on interpretable machine learning and for significant contributions across a wide range of applications.

Fellowship in AAAS, one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals, is a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community.

The 2024 class includes 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators spanning 24 AAAS disciplinary sections who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements. 

“This year’s class of fellows are the embodiment of scientific excellence and service to our communities,” said Sudip S. Parikh, PhD, AAAS chief executive officer and executive publisher of the Science family of journals. “At a time when the future of the scientific enterprise in the US and around the world is uncertain, their work demonstrates the value of sustained investment in science and engineering.”

Rudin is a pioneer and leader in using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to help society and working to make these algorithms transparent. Over the past decade, she has developed techniques for interpretable machine learning, which are predictive models that explain themselves in ways that humans can understand.

Rudin has applied her brand of interpretable machine learning to a wide variety of projects. For instance, recently with funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, Rudin and her colleagues developed an interpretable neural network that can assist medical professionals when reading electroencephalography (EEG) charts of patients in intensive care. Her lab’s previous work with the same neurology team led to the 2HELPS2B score, the only AI model widely used in critical care brain monitoring.

Another previous application of her interpretable machine learning created an intuitive system to decide which New York City manholes were at risk of exploding due to degrading and overloaded electrical circuitry. She has also worked with detectives in Cambridge, Mass., on crime series analysis, to determine whether a new crime is related to past crimes. She also works with a medical imaging team to developing algorithms for breast cancer screening that clearly show doctors how conclusions are being drawn.

She has also been a vocal advocate for stopping the use of “black box” algorithms that hide their decision-making processes in high-stakes situations and warning of the dangers of unregulated AI-fueled technologies.

In 2022, Rudin received the Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work to promote transparent, interpretable and socially responsible AI. With the funding, Rudin developed a multimedia textbook for introductory, graduate level and advanced undergraduate level machine learning. To date, it has lecture notes, slides and more than 100 videos that have received more than 118,000 views.

Rudin is a previous winner of the “new Nobel” $1 million Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She is also a three-time recipient of the INFORMS Innovative Applications in Analytics Award, which recognizes creative and unique applications of analytical techniques, and is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and AAAI.